Album artwork by Laruen Russell
Available for purchase in digital streaming and download Friday, August 14, 2026 on bandcamp.
Between July 20th and July 24th 2026, Tacoma experienced a heatwave into the 90’s. Following a weekend performing at a local festival, and in the middle of a busy gardening season, I fell into a familiar pattern of trying to sleep through the hotter parts of the day and chose to stay up late into the night. The energy was right for me to record.
I have called these recordings “A week of radiance” for several reasons. The radiant heat of the sun, and the radiance of love and joy that I am working to express through my harp. More pointedly, it is an ode to the album by a similar name “Ambient 3 – Day of Radiance” by Brian Eno and Laraaji from which this album owes a nod of inspiration. Eno and Laraaji’s collaboration in 1980 took the sounds of the harp and the tools of signal processing to make a series of recordings organized into dances and meditations, with contrasting levels of energy but to a cohesive effect. Week of radiance took more inspiration from the meditations than the dances, though I did my best to consider how variation would be important in the final product.
Other artists have served as huge inspirations for me in creating this work, including C.J. Boyd, members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Eluvium, Grouper, and a number of unknown artists that I have listened to on the “youarelistening.to” radio for many years. The term “tape loop meditation” comes from a careful aural study of some great masters of a kind of “post-slowcore” music. This album is not supposed to be innovative as much as it is supposed to be an ode to my own inspirations. The tools at my disposal are my harp and guitar pedals. Very minor post editing had been done using Reaper, which I have been continuing to learn to use as a digital audio workstation since 2010.
All the music was recorded simultaneously on video. Most of the master tracks turned out different than the original improvisations, but that the original improvisations have stood alone in their own right. The master tracks had to be composed as a music concrete response to the limitations of LP space. There are still more videos that I haven’t even really dug into yet, so I decided to release this album as “Volume 1” and get to work on only the first few days of recorded material. The videos offer something unique, a perspective on time and space – the sounds of my roosters crowing in the morning, wind chimes, road noise from my garage at 5AM in the morning, and the views of a sun peeking up over a horizon. Unlike the album “wind” which is completely acoustic and aleatoric, “Week of Radiance” is truly electric and concrete – but when the speaker monitors are looping and facing out the door it sounds like they are creating their own steady kind of wind.
The tape loops run significantly longer in the videos to fully incorporate themselves with the ambient noise of their surroundings, and occasionally the phone I was using to video record was moved in different spaces to experience different room effects such as stereo phaser and reverb. The collection of remaining recordings already have other FX chain combinations at my board, and multiple takes of through composed “improvisations”. However, the b-sides at this point are more like a “G-L sides”. This needed to come out first, so the real challenge was trying to condense about 5 hours of music into the fewest amount of “sides” at 22 ½ minutes each. Eventually, I ended up with sides A-F at a total of just over 2 hours for the audio only release.
A note about the recording and effects: some of the tracks were recorded in mono and some in stereo as I was testing different FX-chains in the process. Due to the tape loop effect, this music can sometimes cause some nausea/discomfort listening next to similar ambient sounds with elliptical rhythms such as washing machines.
The album art was originally supposed to be for “Power Napper” and was done by Lauren Russell. I still think it works great here and I would like to thank her for her now decade long support and friendship through art and helping develop a style that continues to show up and define my work. Also included are a number of photos I took on my farm from various beautiful sunsets and sunrises during the week, which may have been the most beautiful week all summer. The dawn looked the same as the dusk with its hues of pink, gold, and blue.
I hope you enjoy “Day of Radiance” as much as I enjoyed creating it. Maybe you can use it to get a good night of sleep, take a nice bath, or maybe just put it on in the background during Wizard of Oz with the sound off and see if it syncs up (please, let me know if it does…) If you have any feedback about this album or my music in general, please hit me up at kevin@kevinshintaku.com
In gratitude,
-Kevin
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